Posted on 03/13/2009 8:23:23 PM PDT by newbie2008
Drop five hundred thousand liberals in the Atlantic ocean?
Did you even read the article?
Good grief. If you read the articles you’ll never get ANYTHING posted.
Yes. Medical education and certification is very strictly controlled in the US. It is simply a way of limiting supply.
We throw away a lot of doctors who immigrate to this country by making it so tough to become certified and I’m not sure it buys us any better quality and certainly makes medical care a lot more expensive.
If doctors worked for no salary, there would be only about 15 percent improvement in these numbers. What is really needed is tort reform that would cut out wasteful defensive medicine, increased usage of electonic recordkeeping and billing, and more usage of health savings accounts combined with catastrophic high-deductible health insurance.
It is not the Doctors running up the medical costs. It is the system.
The medical education is not much more than regular college. The bill runs up because they have to live eat and drive for 3 years. Then they are an intern and resident for another 4 years at a mininum salary. Drs are usually in debt between 150K and 200K coming out of Med school. They are 29 to 30 before they can practice on their own. So it is not the cost as much as the time. They deserve what they make. They make life and death decisions every day and are second guessed all the time. It is not an exact science and every one is different. I know. My son is and E.R. Doc.
What about people like my hubby with pre-existing conditions or older people but too young for medicare?...free market won’t work in this circumstances because free market dictates insuring young healthy people and not older people or people with pre-existing conditions. How about the fact that if you get sick, they immediately raise your premiums. No one ever talks about the realities of heath insurance. This is why we will get some form of managed health care because the GOP did not address the issue in a meaningful way. McCain’s brilliant idea to tax employee benefits in order to fund a 5000 dollar tax credit (can tell this guy never bought individual or family health insurance-way more than five grand) so people could purchase health insurance individually cost him votes for sure.
Any healthcare that starts with insurance is immediately bound to fail. Insurance is the problem, not the solution.
There is some truth in that. Certainly insurance companies, attorneys, and administrators take their cut off the top.
The medical education is not much more than regular college.
That is a false statement. Many other graduate students get a stipends to do their graduate work and incur no debt. I know. That was my case as an engineer. Doctors do incur substantial debt. I know. My wife is an anesthesiologist. If there were fewer financial impediments from getting through medical school and residency, there would be a lot more students willing to put the time in and while the rewards might be lower at the end, they would still be substantial for the time invested. BTW, I'll stack up my years of engineering grad school or the difficulty of my coursework earning starving wages against any doctor you'd care to name. I'm paid well, but not as well as most doctors.
As far as pay for doctors, there are many specialties that get outrageous sums of money- many surgeons, opthamologists, and even anesthesiologists and they get paid a helluva lot more than I do with a $1B satellite in the balance that can keep hundreds to tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians from getting killed. How's that for life and death? You and your colleagues have undoubtedly benefited from my efforts if you were in the 70th Division anytime over the last 25 to 30 years.
You write as if no one has faced the problems you face. I’m 67 years old and know what it’s all about. As to McCain - he is way to hell to liberal for me. As a matter of fact, I’m politically to the right of most conservatives. At least we grow our own food and take care of our own without expecting some else to do it. My advice to you is to improve your circumstances and quit whinning.
Easy to say...hard to do in a downturn of this magnitude.
I disagree. Cost is cost. You are right my son got no stipens but at the U. he went to the cost was the same as grad school. And my son knows how hard engineering courses are. He spent two years in engineering before switching over to medicine. All the harder math and physics that he did not need as a Dr.
Of course you are not paid as well as a Dr. You can get out after 4 years and start making money. It is 7 more years before my son makes any money. Most of his engineering friends are married, have houses and toys by then.
I think if you limit the carrot at the end you will limit doctors. And why should the government instead of the free market set wages anyway. It is the government that got medicine screwed up in the first place. NO one asks if you can pay or if you are legal in an E.R.
Sorry I am an old guy who wore green. ‘68 to ‘74. We hit the moon when I was in.
Now if you want to talk about inequity in pay, look what an NBA player makes and what a brain surgeon makes. Life ain’t fair. We all try to make a difference in our jobs. It is just that my son does it every day in E.R. For what he does and for what he has been through, I think he is paid fairly.
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